In today's challenging marketplace where quality and reliability are at the forefront, warranty and other types of field failure data are becoming increasingly important to analyze and understand. In most practical situations, warranty information provides the closest representation of how a product operates in the customer's hands. However, simply reporting on warranty data is not sufficient because it is reactive, time-consuming, and often times misleading. For example, previous approaches to warranty analysis, such as the Wu/Meeker approach have not fully addressed the needs of customers. The Wu/Meeker approach is described in the following paper: Wu, Huaiqing; and Meeker, William Q. (2002), “Early Detection of Reliability Problems Using Information From Warranty Databases,” Technometrics, 44, 120-133.